Wednesday, July 31, 2013

I don't know where it came from, but this evening my mother gave me this picture of my cousin Kathy and me--taken when we were in 8th grade. I didn't see her again until last November, and we recognized each other immediately :-)

I got a call from my uncle last night. They're clearing out grandpa's house (he's 101 and in an assisted living facility now) and he asked me if I wanted some things. I didn't want the hutch he called about but I told him that since my son will be 18 in a year, I'd like to get some kitchen things for him. I already have pots and pans for him, and today I went and gathered up dishes, flatware, a microwave, a toaster oven, and a small blender.

I've always used old-school hand crank beaters. All I've ever made with them are pudding, jello, cornbread, things like that; clearly I'm not much of a cook. But there in the drawer was grandma's set of electric beaters. So now, for the first time in my life I own a set of electric beaters.

I wonder how long it will take me to use them!

I'll still keep my hand beaters, and since grandma had a set of those, too, I took hers for my son.

Tangent:

The house was built up in the foothills in the 1930's. It was probably never in good shape, but it's in pretty bad shape now. A cousin and her husband are going to gut it or knock it down and build a new house for themselves in its place. Grandma and grandpa bought it in 1976 or '77 and I've always loved going there. Even when I was old enough to see how decrepit the place was, it always felt "cozy".

There's stuff all over the floors now, and what's left will soon get cleared out and sent to a thrift store (or worse). I took my phone in and got some video of the house itself, just so I'll have it.

Tuesday, July 30, 2013

That is because standardized testing guru
David Coleman, lead architect of Common Core, decreed upon becoming
College Board CEO in 2012 that college-entrance tests would be tightly
aligned with the one-size-fits-all national K-12 standards.

That means even home educators cannot steer
clear of the nationalized curriculum if they want their kids to score
high enough on the SAT to gain university admission.

Education historian Diane Ravitch, who has
supported voluntary national standards, has blogged that Coleman “is now
the de facto controller of American education,” a man with no teaching
experience who has decided what all grade-schoolers should know, how
they should be relentlessly tested and what they must show they know to
go to college.

It's interesting to me that people who squealed against federal mandates during NCLB are now so supportive of Common Core. Should I wonder what helped this change along, or do I already know?

Monday, July 29, 2013

Of the few foreign films I have, it seems a plurality are Dutch films about World War II. In fact, I have three of them.

The first is actually an English film from 1941 called One Of Our Aircraft Is Missing. It's about an RAF crew that is smuggled out of the Netherlands thanks to the efforts of the Dutch Underground. A note at the beginning of the movie tells us:

Produced with the full co-operation of the Royal Air Force and the Air Ministry and, above all, of the Royal Netherlands Government, London.

The next two are in Dutch with English subtitles. The first is the Paul Verhoeven film Black Book. The dvd case reads:

In the darkest days of World War II, Jewish fugitives attempt to escape occupied Holland--only to face a Nazi ambush. Rachel Stein alone survives the attack and joins the Dutch Resistance to avenge her family. She soon confronts the ultimate test: she must infiltrate German headquarters by tempting Captain Ludwig Muentze. In the heat of passion, he uncovers her duplicity...but keeps her secret. Then Rachel's espionage reveals that a murderous traitor lurks within Resistance rangks. Unable to fully trust anyone, Rachel navigates a minefield of deception and becomes an enemy to both sides. Epic, passionate, and breathtaking, Black Book relates an untold story of World War II where the distinctions between good and evil become blurred by the complexities of human nature.

The opening of the film tells us the story is "inspired by true events".

The third movie I bought just yesterday on blu-ray, the 2008 movie Winter In Wartime. The case tells us it's the winner of the 2009 Golden Calf at the Netherlands Film Festival, as well as the plot:

Nazi-occupied Holland, 1945. In a snow-covered village, thirteen-year-old Michiel is drawn into the Resistance when he aids a wounded British paratrooper. Michiel's boyish sense of defiance and adventure soon turns to danger and desperation, as Michiel is forced to act without knowing whom to trust among the adults and townspeople around him. Wartime's harsh reality encroaches on childhood innocence as Michiel confronts good and evil, courage and duplicity, and his own burden of responsibility.

All three of these films tell eternal stories of heroism in the face of the darkest evil. The latter two show humanity in individual Germans, the duality creating conflict for the viewer.

These are great stories.

Update: You know what I find interesting about listening to spoken Dutch? It sounds to me like pidgin German.

Last night I started down the 90-day road to making limoncello--inspired to do so, of course, by last summer's trip to Italy. I needed only the "zest" of the lemons, so what to do with the rest of 17 lemons?

A pregnant Maine woman and her friend visiting from Pennsylvania got
lost hiking and were rescued but died later that evening, authorities
said, when they accidentally drove their car into the ocean in the
nighttime fog. link

Over $1 million was given to the AFL-CIO.
$70,000 was given to the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation.
$55,000 was given to the Congressional Hispanic Caucus Institute.
$30,000 was given to Daily Kos.
$125,000 was given to Health Care For America Now!
$150,000 was given to the Ohio Democratic Party.
$250,000 was given to the University of Colorado Boulder Sponsored Project.
Over $4.5 million was given to We Are Ohio.

Private organizations can give their money to whomever they want. But since I'm legally required to give money to this organization, they should be equally required to spend it only on work related directly to teacher pay, benefits, and working conditions.

Sunday, July 28, 2013

I've been very up front about saying that the only reason I'm pursuing a master's degree is because I'm "topped out on my pay scale" and won't see another pay raise until I get one. I chose to get one in math education (8 math classes, 2 education classes) through the University of Idaho Engineering Outreach Program instead of at a diploma mill, though, because I want to learn something that will make me a better classroom teacher. This has already occurred--some things I learned in my Statistical Analysis class will make me a better statistics teacher.

North Carolina took the first step to change their education system and make it better for the children. Governor Pat McCrory (R) signed a bill that eliminates teacher tenure and eliminates automatic pay increases for any teacher who earns a master’s degree.

I'm sure those on the left will say, "See, Darren? Is this what you want when Republicans are in charge?" Of course I would not like to see this, although some reining in of bogus master's degrees should take place. My response, though, is "What do you expect Republicans to do, treat teachers like their best friends?" Perhaps teachers and their unions should stop putting all their eggs in the Democratic basket.

At least one Staten Island resident doesn't agree with Anthony Weiner's assertion his mayoral bid is representative of the middle class in spite of the new sexting revelations.

Weiner was confronted by the voter right after telling reporters he would likely soon stop answering questions about his previous online relationships.
Identifying herself as a Democrat and retired New York City Department of Education employee, Peg Brunda told Weiner she spent 21 years as a teacher and then nine as an assistant principal. As a city employee, "had I conducted myself in the manner in which you conducted yours, my job would have been gone," Brunda said.

Brunda continued, "I don't quite understand how you would feel you have the moral authority as the head administrator in the city to oversee employees when your standard of conduct is so much lower than the standard of conduct that's expected of us."

Why would such personal and completely-legal behavior, that has nothing to do with kids at school, result in a teacher's being fired? Would a teacher be fired if he/she were caught smoking marijuana (if so, one of those mythical teacher shortages you hear about every year or two would definitely take place)? The teacher probably would not be.

For the 8 zillionth time, I assert that what teachers do on their own time is no one's business but their own (unless, of course, it relates to kids or school somehow). Ms. Brunda is correct that she'd be fired, but she shouldn't be.

Community college student Ernesto Fajardo was looking for a
seasonal job two years ago when a friend told him about an opening at a
federally subsidized tutoring company.

After passing a background
check, Fajardo, then 20, began helping struggling Sacramento students
who qualified for free tutoring under the federal No Child Left Behind
Act.

He said he quickly realized something was amiss with the
company, which struggled financially and ultimately stopped paying him.

"They didn't give us any training," said Fajardo, who lives in Elk
Grove. "They called to make sure we would turn in our paperwork. Other
than that, they didn't care."

Yet this was a company that charged
California school districts millions of dollars as part of a federally
funded tutoring mandate called Supplemental Educational Services.
Proponents of the SES program, which awards about $1,500 in tutoring to
students at low- performing schools, call the service an educational
lifeline.

Saturday, July 27, 2013

More than a few years ago I took a week-long vacation with a friend who booked the trip through Ramada (note: I'll never stay at a Ramada again). The only good part of the entire trip that Ramada had any control over was the 2-night cruise from Florida to Nassau on board the Bahamas Celebration, a converted European ferry. Here's a phototour of that ship from USAToday.

Wednesday, July 24, 2013

A Michigan college student who was suspended for writing an essay called "Hot For Teacher" had no First Amendment right to express his sexual attraction to his creative writing professor, a federal judge ruled.

The lawsuit filed by the student, Joseph Corlett, 57, against Oakland University was dismissed by U.S. District Judge Patrick Duggan on Tuesday...

Corlett, a licensed residential builder, decided to pursue a college
degree full-time in 2011 due to the economic downturn, according to the
federal complaint.

He said he was under the impression that there were no restrictions on
what he could write about in his journal for his creative writing class.

Corlett turned in the journal, containing the essay, in November 2011,
and was shortly thereafter called into the dean's office for a meeting.

In January 2012, after a campus hearing, the university, located in
Rochester, Mich., found Corlett guilty of intimidation. Another charge,
for sexual harassment, was dropped. Corlett was suspended for three
semesters, banned from stepping foot on campus and required to seek out
psychological counseling before he could be eligible to re-enroll,
according to his federal complaint.

President Barack Obama’s goal of holding all students across the U.S. to the same high academic standards may be on the verge of unraveling as states take a hard look at the more rigorous tests under development — and balk.

Backed by $360 million in federal grants, some 40-plus states have spent the past three years working with testing companies to develop math and language arts exams tied to the academic standards known as Common Core. They’re minimizing the dreary fill-in-the-bubble multiple choice in favor of more challenging tasks. Kids as young as third grade, for instance, will be asked to write essays synthesizing information from multiple nonfiction texts and to explain their reasoning on math problems.

Yet now that the new tests are almost ready, state officials are complaining that they’re too long and too costly and require too much computer technology. They’re also beginning to push back against the exams as an unwanted federal intrusion on local policy, echoing a groundswell of opposition from tea party critics of Common Core.

Georgia dropped out of the testing collaboration on Monday, saying it would create its own exams instead. Pennsylvania, Alabama, Oklahoma and Utah have already withdrawn. There are strong indications that Florida and Indiana will be next. Other populous states are also teetering. The Michigan Legislature has effectively nixed the new tests by blocking spending on them, though the ban may be revisited next fall. New York is officially undecided but it’s already spending heavily on alternatives. Texas and Virginia never signed on in the first place.

Tuesday, July 23, 2013

Fort Bend ISD says Kenyan Rodgers, 42, was arrested July 16 on charges of indecency with a child and aggravated sexual assault of a child.

Texas Southern University police arrested Rodgers following an alleged sexual assault investigation involving a 13-year-old girl who was on the university campus for band camp on July 15. Neither the child or the teacher are affiliated with the university.

Saying that "the darkest corners of the Internet" pose a real threat
to children, British Prime Minister David Cameron on Monday rolled out a
plan that would, by default, block pornography on most computers,
smartphones and tablets.

British wireless and
Internet providers have agreed to put adult-content filters on phones,
public Wi-Fi networks and home computers in the coming months. By the
end of the year, the filters will become the default setting for anyone
setting up broadband Internet service at home, Cameron said.

"I'm not making this
speech because I want to (moralize) or scare-monger, but because I feel
profoundly as a politician, and as a father, that the time for action
has come," Cameron said. "This is, quite simply, about how we protect our children and their innocence."

All of those filters could be deactivated by those who can "prove" they are 18 or older, Cameron said.

Parents are clearly not capable of doing what Nanny Dave wants done, so now government will decide who can watch what kind of porn.

So the darkest corners of the Internet pose a real threat to children? Is that threat as strong as the threat posed by an all-encompassing Big Brother?

Monday, July 22, 2013

As glamorized on the TV series Numb3rs, math can be a terrific asset in the field of law enforcement. Software can certainly be a part of that. There are some potential pitfalls, though: law enforcement can get too reliant on software and forget how to do actual police work, law enforcement and the public can put too much faith in the abilities of the software, and the potential for privacy abuse is significant.

I'm reminded of this post I wrote almost 7 years ago about going to the National Training Center with older equipment vs. newer equipment:

One of the NTC evaluators once said to us that brigades from the 4th
Division often performed better than brigades with M1's and Bradleys.
The reason, he said, was because units so equipped expected their superior equipment
to win the battles for them, whereas units from the 4th, because our
equipment was not noticeably superior to the faux Soviet equipment
(except in night operations), relied on our tactics and battle plans to win the day.

It's certainly easy to fall into that trap, though, and while I worry about that, the privacy concerns obviously loom larger.

Criminal offences, like infectious disease, form patterns in time and
space. A burglary in a placid neighbourhood represents a heightened
risk to surrounding properties; the threat shrinks swiftly if no further
offences take place. These patterns have spawned a handful of
predictive products which seem to offer real insight. During a
four-month trial in Kent, 8.5% of all street crime occurred within
PredPol’s pink boxes, with plenty more next door to them; predictions
from police analysts scored only 5%. An earlier trial in Los Angeles saw
the machine score 6% compared with human analysts’ 3%.

Intelligent policing can convert these modest gains into significant
reductions in crime. Cops working with predictive systems respond to
call-outs as usual, but when they are free they return to the spots
which the computer suggests. Officers may talk to locals or report
problems, like broken lights or unsecured properties, that could
encourage crime. Within six months of introducing predictive techniques
in the Foothill area of Los Angeles, in late 2011, property crimes had
fallen 12% compared with the previous year; in neighbouring districts
they rose 0.5% (see chart). Police in Trafford, a suburb of Manchester
in north-west England, say relatively simple and sometimes cost-free
techniques, including routing police driving instructors through
high-risk areas, helped them cut burglaries 26.6% in the year to May
2011, compared with a decline of 9.8% in the rest of the city...

Predicting and forestalling crime does not solve its root causes.
Positioning police in hotspots discourages opportunistic wrongdoing, but
may encourage other criminals to move to less likely areas. And while
data-crunching may make it easier to identify high-risk offenders—about
half of American states use some form of statistical analysis to decide
when to parole prisoners—there is little that it can do to change their
motivation.

Misuse and overuse of data can amplify biases. It matters, for
example, whether software crunches reports of crimes or arrests; if the
latter, police activity risks creating a vicious circle. And
report-based systems may favour rich neighbourhoods which turn to the
police more readily rather than poor ones where crime is rife. Crimes
such as burglary and car theft are more consistently reported than drug
dealing or gang-related violence.

It's vital that the software itself, and the uses to which law enforcement puts such software, be absolutely transparent. "Black box" solutions don't do anyone any good in math class, and I don't see how they'll provide any better solution in law enforcement.

But mathematical models might make policing more equitable by curbing
prejudice. A suspicious individual’s presence in a “high-crime area” is
among the criteria American police may use to determine whether a search
is acceptable: a more rigorous definition of those locations will stop
that justification being abused. Detailed analysis of a convict’s
personal history may be a fairer reason to refuse parole than similarity
to a stereotype.

Can the police use what you put on social media without a warrant? Yes, it's public, and you made it public, but they can't tail you in public without a warrant--but they can listen to your conversations if you speak loudly enough. Which example is the correct one with social media?

The legal limits on using social media to fish out likely wrongdoers, or
create files on them, are contested. Most laws governing police
investigations pre-date social networking, and some forces assert that
all information posted to public forums is fair game. But Jamie Bartlett
of Demos, a British think-tank, says citizens and police forces need
clearer guidance about how to map physical-world privacy rights onto
online spaces. He thinks gathering information about how someone behaves
on social sites ought to require the same clearance needed to monitor
them doggedly in public places. Officers who register anonymously or
pseudonymously to read content, or send web crawlers to trawl sites
against their owner’s wishes, would require yet more supervision.

Very vexing issues, which I'm sure will keep the next generation of lawyers well-paid and the next generation of law enforcement, lawmakers, and the judicial system very busy.

This weekend was my 30th reunion, with events scheduled each day. I went to the mixer on Friday night at a house not too far from mine, as well as to the family picnic yesterday. I skipped the dinner/dance on Saturday, that's just not my thing.

Here are a couple pics from yesterday:

The last few of us who couldn't leave just yet.

Joellen and I have known each other since 3rd grade. She also went to grad school with a classmate of mine from West Point!

Me relaxing.

As with 5 years ago, and every 5 years before that, our class' counselor was feted like a rock star. He first started teaching in 1959! I don't have a pic of him here but he looks the same :-)

Sunday, July 21, 2013

You might be thinking, where have I seen Suzi Quatro before? I know that name.... Well, the source of all knowledge remembers better than any of us:

Quatro is known in the United States for her role as female bass player Leather Tuscadero on the television show Happy Days. Show producer Garry Marshall offered the role without an audition after seeing a picture of her on his daughter's bedroom wall. Leather was the younger sister of Fonzie's girlfriend, hot-rod driver Pinky Tuscadero. Leather fronted a rock band joined by principal character Joanie Cunningham. The character returned in other cameo roles, including once for a date to a fraternity formal with Ralph Malph. Marshall offered Quatro a Leather Tuscadero spin-off, but she refused, saying she did not want to be typecast.

Saturday, July 20, 2013

I teach statistics. Not AP statistics, just regular ole statistics. Mine is one of the few schools I know of where a non-AP statistics class is taught.

I teach the AP statistics content, however. If I were to teach ordinary stats content as defined under California's 1997 math standards (I've seen too many versions of Common Core standards to know yet what I'm supposed to teach!), the course wouldn't take a semester. In fact, under California's standardized testing regime, most of the non-AP standards are assessed on Algebra 2 students--even though this statistics material isn't part of the Algebra 2 standards!

It's a very goofed-up system.

As I said, I teach the AP content. No, I don't teach it to the detail or rigor required of an AP course, but I teach the content (and then some). I've had students email me from college and tell me they didn't learn anything in their college stats classes because they'd learned all the material in my class. It's rewarding to hear that.

I tell my students that if they're doing well in class, and if they're willing to put in a little bit of additional effort, they could do well on the AP test. I don't recall how many students I had who took the AP Stats test this year, but I could remember 3 by name. I haven't heard from one of them but the other two both scored 4's. I'm fairly pleased.

That's a long introduction to this story in the major Sacramento newspaper:

Performance on AP tests has improved locally even as more students take
them. About 62 percent of AP tests in the region featured scores high
enough to earn college credit last year, up from 60 percent in 2010 and
56 percent in 2005, state figures show...

Denise Pope, a senior lecturer at the Stanford University Graduate
School of Education, recently conducted a review into the value of AP
classes. She said the rise in students taking the classes may not be as
positive as many parents and administrators hope.

"There is really
not clear research on what you get out of an AP course," she said.
"Will you do better in college, save money or get out of certain classes
and perform better in classes? There is not good data"...

While many universities grant college credit to students who score at least a 3 out of 5, top private schools have stricter criteria and typically require a 4 or 5 depending on the subject.

Charles Cole, senior associate director of admissions and outreach at California State University, Sacramento, said students who come into college with AP credits have a clear advantage. About 1,500 of the school's 3,100 freshmen had AP credit upon admission last year, up 17 percent from 2011, he said.

It seems, however, that there are a few more kinks to work out before
we all toss out the books and the buildings for good. Inside Higher Ed
reported on Thursday that San Jose State is suspending the Udacity partnership just six months after it launched. The problem: More than half the students in the first batch of online courses failed their final exams.

If you're concerned about the quality of education, and about high standards, a high failure rate isn't a priori a bad thing; what you really want to know is to what standard was the course taught, how were the students assessed, and are the assessment results a valid representation of what the students learned. None of that was mentioned in this story, only the failure rate was--which leads me to wonder if San Jose State is dropping this partnership for no other reason than it made them look bad.

Protesters say the RFID chips infringe on civil liberties, privacy rights and religious freedoms and children don't need to be "tracked."

Personally I don't see any violation of religious freedom here, and to argue such is patently silly. Doesn't mean the RFID chips are OK, just that that's not a good argument against them. The other arguments, though...

After a drawn-out battle waged in court and within the community, school officials with the Northside Independent School District have announced their decision to stop using a student tracking program that relied on RFID tracking badges containing tiny chips that produce a radio signal, enabling school officials to track students’ location on school property.

If we teach kids to accept to accept such surveillance, how can we expect them to think like free citizens as adults? For that same reason I deplore so much of what is taught in schools....

Former U.S. president Jimmy Carter is so concerned about the NSA
spying scandal that he thinks it has essentially resulted in a
suspension of American democracy.

“America does not at the moment have a functioning democracy,” he said at an event in Atlanta on Tuesday sponsored by the Atlantik Bruecke,
a private nonprofit association working to further the German-U.S.
relationship. The association’s name is German for “Atlantic bridge.”

Tuesday, July 16, 2013

I don't want to kick in one more cent of tax money until this is addressed:

Yet UC’s annual spending exceeds that of most state governments,
amounting to roughly $100,000 for each of its students. Much of this is
unrelated to instructional function. The university’s bureaucracy is
famously monumental, centralized and costly: Aside from a full cohort of
administrators and support staff at each of the 10 campuses, the
central office in Oakland employs more than 2,000 workers, a staggering
number (2,358 full-time employees, according to
the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System). There are 10
“divisions” in the Office of the President, for example. Its “external
relations” division lists more than 55 managerial-type employees on
organizational charts, and that number doesn’t include support
personnel.

The “business operations” and “academic affairs”
divisions are much larger. One senior non-UC university president said
to me once that the central office could be reduced by more than half
and the university wouldn’t suffer.

The university took some
budgetary hits from the state in recent years but offset them with huge
tuition increases. No serious attempt was made to vastly cut costs. How
many senior faculty at, say, Berkeley teach more than 200 hours a year?
How much of the so-called research
by these professors is read or cited? I suspect a lot of it has little
impact. How many buildings lie largely dormant for months each year?

The National Education Association and the Federation of Teachers, which together represent some 4.5 million teachers and others, both are urging the Department of Justice to investigate George Zimmerman, who was acquitted by a jury of second-degree murder in the Florida killing of teenager Trayvon Martin.

When the unions I'm required to support will focus (only) on my pay, benefits, and working conditions, I'll gladly pay, be a member, and stop resisting them. Until then they can kiss my ...

Update: Why do I support this guy? I don't. I don't think he's an angel, but I don't think he needs to be sacrificed just because the kid he killed was black. This grievance-industrial complex must come to an end.

Monday, July 15, 2013

Larry Sand, president of the California Teachers Empowerment Network (full disclosure: I'm on the board of directors of CTEN), has published yet another fantastic article in City Journal. While we hope against hope for a reasonable ruling in the CEAI case, Larry provides some information on court rulings regarding union membership:

Some background: in 1977, in Abood v. Detroit Board of Education,
the Court ruled that compulsory dues are unconstitutional and that
unions could collect only those fees necessary for collective bargaining
and sundry other representational activities. (The justices extended
their ruling to private unions 11 years later, in Communication Workers of America v. Beck.) In 1986, in Teachers v. Hudson,
the Court set out specific requirements that unions must meet to
collect fees from nonmembers without violating their First Amendment
rights. But nonmembers blanched as unions took a more expansive
interpretation of the Court’sdecisions. And so the justices last year issued a somewhat sterner rebuke in Knox v. Service Employees International Union, Local 1000. In that case, brought by the National Right to Work Foundation, the justices ruled
7–2 that the SEIU could not force its nonmembers to pay the portion of
union dues spent on political activities—even if the union believed it
was for the workers’ own good. In 2005 and 2006, as part of its campaign
to defeat Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger and a pair of ballot
initiatives that would reduce union power and reform pensions, the SEIU
imposed a temporary, 25 percent across-the-board dues hike on its
dues-paying members and some 28,000 fee-paying nonmembers alike.
The union argued that campaigning against the initiatives would benefit
all workers. Had this view prevailed, it would have eradicated the legal
distinction between politics and collective bargaining. But even
liberal justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ruth Bader Ginsburg saw through it
and voted with the majority.

Now you know. And if you're a California teacher and want out of the union, check out CTEN's web site (here specifically).

If true at all, one wonders why people would celebrate adoption of these standards:

The notion that Common Core’s college and career readiness standards are
“rigorous” needs to be publicly put to bed by Arne Duncan, his
erstwhile friends at the Fordham Institute, and the media. Two of Common
Core’s own mathematics standards writers have publicly stated how weak
Common Core’s college readiness mathematics standards are. At a public
meeting of the Massachusetts Board of Elementary and Secondary Education
in March 2010, physics professor Jason Zimba said: “the concept of
college readiness is minimal and focuses on non-selective colleges.”
Mathematics professor William McCallum told a group of mathematicians:
“the overall standards would not be too high, certainly not in
comparison [to] other nations, including East Asia, where math education
excels.” What words don’t Duncan, Finn, Petrilli, and the media
understand? Why keep on pretending that Fordham Institute’s A- for
Common Core’s math standards was an honest grade.

That people still talk of this brings back memories of busing nightmares in the early 1970s:

School segregation remains a reality: “74 percent of African Americans still attend majority nonwhite schools, compared to just over 76 percent in the late 1960s,” writes The Nation‘s Greg Kauffman.

But there’s a demographic reality to consider, responds Matthew Yglesias in Slate. U.S. schools are running low on white kids.

Non-Hispanic whites were 54 percent of the under-18 population in 2010, compared to 74 percent in 1980, according to the Census Bureau. Furthermore, among kids under the age of 5, non-Hispanic whites are a minority...

We can’t integrate our way to better school performance, agrees Sara Mead. That includes socio-economic integration, the dream of “smart liberal school reformers in recent years.” Like whites, middle-class students from two-parent families are in short supply and not evenly distributed.

The challenge is to design schools to meet the needs of low-income, minority students.

I have no doubt that this design includes modifying culture to one that values education.

The Obama administration may raise taxes on everyone’s phone
lines by about $5 per year to increase K-12 tech subsidies because most
schools cannot administer the computerized Common Core tests coming out
in 2015.

President Obama announced the Federal Communications Commission
(FCC) will likely overhaul the schools and libraries universal service
support program, commonly known as E-Rate. He also asked the U.S.
Department of Education to use federal funding to give teachers more
training in using technology.

Saturday, July 13, 2013

The problem is societal, and schools will not be able to fix what society has broken. We need a societal shift, one that values education and doesn't give out trophies for mere participation, or the problem continues:

I also worry that Princeton, and presumably other like universities, are
not addressing the current generational shift. About five years ago, a
working committee on which I served decided to jettison three weeks of
course material in order to concentrate on the remainder. Otherwise we
teach physics at Princeton much as it was taught fifty years ago. To
this day corridor arguments persist between old-timers who believe we
are engaged in a race to the bottom and those who believe that we must
adapt or die. I am of two minds. None of us embraces a dumbed-down
course, but at the same time it seems to me that the typical faculty
response, “Freshman physics hasn’t changed in fifty years, why should
we?” is a recipe for slow suicide. Unfortunately the “advanced” methods
of professional science educators—each of whom seems to feel he or she
is in possession of the magic bullet—leave the majority of active
physicists, including myself, cold. I do know that in the long run the
students will win, but if winning means teaching the students currently
being produced by our high schools, then either high schools must wake
up to the demands and to the competition, or universities must be
prepared for a drawn-out Pyrrhic victory.

Friday, July 12, 2013

Wal-Mart is rolling out the first batch of new Twinkies in 1,600
stores on Friday. And by Sunday, Twinkies will be available in 3,000 Wal-Mart(WMT, Fortune 500) stores, according to company spokeswoman Veronica Marshall.

Wal-Mart is selling Twinkies in an exclusive collectible box that says
"First Batch" on the packaging and has the new Twinkies tagline: "The
Sweetest Comeback in the History of Ever." They cost $2.98 for a box of
10.

Thursday, July 11, 2013

I buy DVD's/blu-rays all the time, but the last CD I can remember buying was about 8 years ago; usually I just buy individual songs from iTunes or Amazon. I stopped by Best Buy today, though, to check out movies and saw this 2-CD Journey set for only $10 and had to buy it. Check out the songs!

Disc 1

"Only the Young" – 4:05, from the soundtrack to the 1985 film Vision Quest
"Don't Stop Believin'" – 4:09, from the 1981 album Escape
"Wheel in the Sky" – 4:13, from the 1978 album Infinity
"Faithfully" – 4:26, from the 1983 album Frontiers
"Any Way You Want It" – 3:22, from the 1980 album Departure
"Ask the Lonely" – 3:54, from the soundtrack to the 1983 film Two of a Kind
"Who's Crying Now" – 5:01, from the 1981 album Escape
"Separate Ways (Worlds Apart)" – 5:26, from the 1983 album Frontiers
"Lights" – 3:10, from the 1978 album Infinity
"Lovin', Touchin', Squeezin'" – 3:54, from the 1979 album Evolution
"Open Arms" – 3:19, from the 1981 album Escape
"Girl Can't Help It" – 3:50, from the 1986 album Raised on Radio
"Send Her My Love" – 3:55, from the 1983 album Frontiers
"When You Love a Woman" – 4:08, from the 1996 album Trial By Fire
"I'll Be Alright Without You" – 4:34, from the 1986 album Raised on Radio
"After the Fall" – 5:01, from the 1983 album Frontiers

Disc 2

"Chain Reaction" – 4:20, from the 1983 album Frontiers
"Message of Love" – 5:34, from the 1996 album Trial By Fire
"Somethin' to Hide" – 3:30, from the 1978 album Infinity
"Line of Fire" – 3:18, from the 1981 live album Captured
"Anytime" – 3:28, from the 1978 album Infinity
"Stone in Love" – 4:25, from the 1981 album Escape
"Patiently" – 3:22, from the 1978 album Infinity
"Good Morning Girl" – 1:44, from the 1980 album Departure
"The Eyes of a Woman" – 4:33, from the 1986 album Raised on Radio
"Be Good to Yourself" – 3:52, from the 1986 album Raised on Radio
"Still They Ride" – 3:49, from the 1981 album Escape
"Baby I'm a Leavin' You" – 2:47, from the 1996 album Trial by Fire
"Mother, Father" – 5:28, from the 1981 album Escape
"Just the Same Way" – 3:18, from the 1979 album Evolution
"Escape" – 5:17, from the 1981 album Escape
"The Party's Over (Hopelessly in Love)" – 3:41, from the 1981 live album Captured

I'm essentially reliving high school right now, which is pretty cool with my 30th reunion in a week!

I am so old that I can remember when most of the people promoting race hate were white...

The time is long overdue to stop looking for progress through racial or
ethnic leaders. Such leaders have too many incentives to promote
polarizing attitudes and actions that are counterproductive for
minorities and disastrous for the country.

Look at the residents of this ‘gated community’ who lived just in that one spot. It is more diverse than a Democrat photo-op. This neighborhood had young and old, Asians and blacks and whites and Hispanics all living next to each other in peace, but needing gates and a neighborhood watch to protect themselves from outsiders.

Without the race-baiters — now almost exclusively to be found in the Democratic Party and its media wing — Americans get along pretty well. And it’s certainly a more diverse crowd than at Obama Campaign HQ.

Posted at 12:57 pm by Glenn Reynolds

CNN is still referring to Zimmerman as a "white Hispanic", apparently the only example of such in the entire history of the news service:

Florida authorities have a message as the verdict in the George Zimmerman trial looms: raise your voice, not your hands.

Anticipating that the
outcome of the very public, and racially-tinged, case is likely to
disappoint one swath of the population or another, law enforcement
agencies have set up a response plan.

For the past several years I've purchased a savings bond and some stock for my son for his birthday and for Christmas.

Perhaps a year ago the Bureau of the Public Debt stopped issuing paper savings bonds; new bonds are now just electrons on a computer somewhere. I decided to stop purchasing bonds and put that additional money towards stocks.

I bank with Major California Bank. It used to be that I could go online, transfer money from my account to my son's savings account, and then transfer that same sum from his savings account to his brokerage account, from which I would purchase stock. Then, a couple years ago, they put a new hitch in the process--I couldn't transfer the money from his savings to his brokerage account online, I had to call them and they would conduct that transfer. Odd and inefficient, but not exceedingly difficult.

My son's birthday is coming up so yesterday I called MCB to transfer the money to his brokerage account. They said they couldn't do that, the accounts aren't the "right type". After much discussion, I was able to understand their bottom line--due to types of accounts my son's accounts are, as well as the types mine are, there is no possible way at this time to put money into his brokerage account. At all. It would take both of us going into a branch and filling out a form in order to turn his savings account into the type that would then allow us to transfer money from there into his brokerage account.

MCB was kind enough to email me this form in response to my complaint, but they didn't answer my question: what has changed, and why? Why can I no longer do what I used to be able to do? Why is there no way to put money into his brokerage account today?

So now it's no savings bonds or stock. Silver prices have plummeted recently, I think I'll go spend that money on silver bullion.

Update, 7/11/13: After a couple emails with the bank I've learned that it *isn't* a new law mandating this, it's the bank's own "compliance department". Attorneys sit around just thinking up crap like this.

Tuesday, July 09, 2013

The "standards of mathematical practice", how we're supposed to teach, embedded in the Common Core is NCTM's wet dream. Their standards didn't work in the 90s and there's no reason to think they're going to work now. The Math Cold War looks to be getting hot again:

The New York Times recently published a piece called “The Faulty Logic of the Math Wars” by W. Stephen Wilson (a math professor at Johns Hopkins University) and Alice Crary. It focuses on the beliefs and practices of those known as math reformers. For over twenty years, there has been a battle between two philosophies of how best to teach math in the K-12 arena. The differences of opinion have resulted in what has come to be known as the “math wars”.

While the article itself is worth reading, I found the reaction of the readers to be equally fascinating. They revealed the ideological divide that defines this “war”. I was reminded of Tom Wolfe’s famous description of the reaction of the New Yorker literati to his 1965 article in the New York Herald Tribune that criticized the culture of The New Yorker magazine: “They screamed like weenies over a wood fire.”

Many of those who commented on the Times article about math agreed with the premise of the article and expressed their appreciation for viewpoint that supported the teaching of standard algorithms such as adding and multiplying multi-digit numbers. Others accused the authors of casting the situation as one of either/or, and that their claims that the teaching of standard algorithms in the early grades is avoided is an exaggeration.

This is the part of what we're being force-fed at my school that drives me nuts:

Which brings us to what is actually meant by “understanding”. What the reform camp means by understanding is different than from what many mathematicians and those in the more traditional camp mean. The reform approach to “understanding” is teaching small children never to trust the math, unless you can visualize why it works. If you can’t “visualize” it, you can’t explain it. And if you can’t explain it, then you don’t “understand” it. According to Robert Craigen, math professor at University of Manitoba, “Forcing students to use inefficient procedures that require ham-handed handling of place value so that they articulate “meaning” out loud in every stage is the arithmetic equivalent of forcing a reader to keep his finger on the page and to sound out every word, every time, with no progression of reading skill.”

I like evidence. I definitely like this suggestion:

Why don’t those arguing for better math education look at what those students are doing who are succeeding in pursuing majors in science, engineering or math? It is likely that you will see students learning standard algorithms and practicing many drills and problems (deemed dull, tedious and “mind numbing”) and other techniques viewed by reformers as not resulting in true, deep understanding. But such an outcome based investigation is not occurring.

The article closes thusly:

And in answer to the statement that we’re all saying the same thing: No. We’re not saying the same thing at all.

This post, which I copy in its entirety, highlights a situation that can pull me in two different directions:

The Ugliness of Reverse Animus

by Stephen H. Miller on July 6, 2013

The 68-year-old proprietress of Arlene’s Flowers in Richland, Washington, is the target of a lawsuit by Washington state Attorney General Bob Ferguson because she refused to provide wedding flowers for a customer who was marrying his partner. Washington state legalized same-sex marriage in December.

According to CNN’s Belief Blog, Barronelle Stutzman, an evangelical, “said she agonized over the decision but couldn’t support a wedding that her faith forbids. ‘I was not discriminating at all,’ she said. ‘I never told him he couldn’t get married. I gave him recommendations for other flower shops.’”

Not surprisingly, “Among conservative Christians, Stutzman has become a byword—part cautionary tale and part cause celebre.”

Must progressivism decree that the power of the state be so absolute that there be no exemption from its dictate for religious conviction, not to speak of individual liberty? Apparently so, given Obamacare’s model of requiring private business owners to pay for their employees contraception, including abortifacient drugs, despite their religious convictions. In both cases, the state is not stopping one party from harming another; its forcing what it sees as positive behavior upon those who have a different view.

The pagans persecuted the Christians, and then the Christians came to power and persecuted the pagans. Similarly, there’s more here of animus against those who deviate from the one-true correct political line than anything else. It’s not only mean and vulgar, it’s politically counterproductive. But I’m sure using the power of the state to crush those who don’t toe the line makes those who can now persecute feel smugly empowered.

Of course I agree with the last two paragraphs, but that's not what I want to focus on. I want to focus on telling people you don't want their business.

Yes, we have free speech and religious rights, and I defend them quite vigorously on this blog. As an entrepreneur, though, you're engaged as part of society in commerce, and we as a society are not going to allow such apartheid. We're not going back to "no coloreds allowed" businesses. We're just not.

I will support the pharmacist who doesn't want to sell RU-486 in his personal pharmacy; no one should be compelled to sell anything they don't want to sell in their own business. However, business owners cannot turn customers away in our society; they cannot refuse to sell to certain people. To the florist above: you're not supporting gay marriage, you're selling flowers. Would you refuse to sell flowers to someone of a different religion, or a different political party? As a society we've decided that you cannot. And I'm OK with that decision.

Friday’s employment report wasn’t bad. But given how depressed our
economy remains, we really should be adding more than 300,000 jobs a
month, not fewer than 200,000. As the Economic Policy Institute points out,
we would need more than five years of job growth at this rate to get
back to the level of unemployment that prevailed before the Great
Recession. Full recovery still looks a very long way off. And I’m
beginning to worry that it may never happen.

Really, Paul? Not a "full recovery"? Why do you think that is? Could it have anything to do with that socialist in the White House, and all the social legislation that you've cheered for so long? You think maybe?

No one really believes that liberals are open-minded, but they still try to tell us they are. My latest data point that they live in echo chambers is this information from Gallup, reported in the Washington Post. Note the percentages shown in the graphic from that link:
About 4x the percentage of Republicans watch Fox over CNN, but over 15x the percentage of Democrats watch CNN over Fox. Throw in "leaners" and the ratios change to 3.6x and 21x, respectively.

Conservatives watch Fox over CNN by a ratio of 3.76:1, moderates watch CNN over Fox by a ratio of 3:1, but liberals watch CNN over Fox by a ration of 13:1.

Which party and ideology seems more willing to listen to the other side?

1 – Facts prevent understanding
2 – Teacher-led instruction is passive
3 – The 21st century fundamentally changes everything
4 – You can always just look it up
5 – We should teach transferable skills
6 – Projects and activities are the best way to learn
7 – Teaching knowledge is indoctrination

No Child Left Behind failed because “American educators, dutifully following the seven myths, regard reading as a skill that could be employed without relevant knowledge,” writes Hirsch. They wasted time on “strategies” for test taking.

Hirsch fears Common Core State Standards, which he supports, will fail too if teachers are “compelled to engage in the same superficial, content-indifferent activities, given new labels like ‘text complexity’ and ‘reading strategies’.”

Numbers 1 and 2 are big for me; I marvel that anyone is ignorant enough to believe them. Number 6 just drives me nuts.

I'm skeptical--not because I'm some sort of math purist or anything, but because my own experience with manipulatives and apps and "let's make learning fun by turning it into a game" informs me that the hype is much greater than the reality (Gettysburg aside).

On average, it took 41 minutes and 44 seconds for students to master Algebra skills during the Washington State Algebra Challenge using the DragonBox App.

The Challenge, co-sponsored by Washington University’s Center for Game Science and the Technology Alliance included 4,192 K-12 students. Together, they solved 390,935 equations over the course of 5 days in early June. According to the Challenge’s calculations, that’s 6 months, 28 days, and 2 hours worth of algebra work.

What’s even more impressive, “of those students who played at least 1.5 hours, 92.9% achieved mastery. Of those students who played at least 1 hour, 83.8% achieved mastery. Of those students who played at least 45 minutes, 73.4% achieved mastery.”

How was this mastery evaluated? That's not mentioned in the story.

I downloaded the app and was astonished to see how quickly my son (then 7) learned to do complex algebraic equations.

Does anyone believe that a normal 1st grader can really do algebra? It drives me nuts when non-math people show off something some young child is doing and say "this is algebra!" Uh, the vast majority of the time it's not. If it were, we wouldn't still be struggling to get some 12th graders to pass algebra.

Unless you think that this app is the silver bullet we've been missing all along. My experience is that there is often a huge gap between the game or manipulative and the transference of what's learned there to actual algebra.

Sunday, July 07, 2013

My son and 3 of his friends, along with grandpa and our two new neighbors, helped me lift that roof and put the pedestals under it. Went smooth as silk with that many people lifting! (It's heavy--that's not aluminum, but sheet metal.)

Saturday, July 06, 2013

But the results for blacks are a big surprise. Blacks are more likely
(by 7 percentage points) to think most blacks are racist than to think
most whites are. Moreover, they are 11 points likelier than liberals
(regardless of race) to think most blacks are racist, and 9 points
likelier than Democrats. And blacks are 3 points less likely than liberals to think most whites are racist.

All of which suggests that the people likeliest to believe most
whites are racist and most blacks are not are those who are both liberal
and white. Which reinforces a point we've made often in this column:
that a lot of what drives the futile debate over race in America is
white liberals' psychological need to feel morally superior to other
whites. (boldface mine--Darren)

As I said, I'm trying to do the "slow and steady wins the race" approach to getting this cover assembled, spending about an hour a day and hoping to be done by the end of July. I've been working in the evenings lately, but my son is a lifeguard at a local water park and he's taking me on the slides when his shift is done today; therefore, I had to work early. Here's today's progress:

AltaVista, once the most advanced and comprehensive search engine on the Web, is just days away from its last breath...

Readers who are 18 years old and younger will probably ask, “What’s an AltaVista?” In short, it was one of the first and most successful search engines. It was founded in 1995 by Digital Equipment Corporation.

Of course there are important differences between an incestuous or a
polygamous marriage and a loving committed relationship between two
homosexuals. Indeed, it’s instructive that many gay-rights activists
take offense whenever opponents say that legalizing gay marriage will
lead to polygamy, incest or bestiality. They insist such comparisons are
ridiculous. And they’re right! But it’s also ridiculous to equate Jim
Crow prohibitions on interracial marriage to prohibitions on gay
marriage.

If you can’t see the problem, it’s this: The whole point of the
civil-rights movement is that skin color is superficial. Sex — i.e.,
male, female — is actually a real and deep biological difference. You
could look it up...

When Republicans tried to filibuster the Affordable Care Act (a k a
ObamaCare), Sen. Harry Reid lamented, “When this body was on the verge
of guaranteeing equal civil rights to everyone regardless of the color
of their skin, some senators resorted to the same filibuster threats
that we hear today.”

That’s true! But . . . so what? How, exactly is opposition to an
ever-more disastrous health-care reform bill akin to denying the
humanity of African-American citizens? Is any filibuster threat now
tainted by Dixiecrat opposition to civil rights?

Let's remember which party those Dixiecrats represented...and now back to our snippets:

The Washington Post reported this week that civil-rights activists in
Florida are dismayed that the George Zimmerman murder trial in Florida
isn’t racially divisive enough. “It makes you feel kind of angry and
kind of bad that race is not a part of this,” the Rev. Harrold C.
Daniels, told the Post. “It’s a missed opportunity"...

When the Supreme Court recently ruled that the Voting Rights Act needed
to take into account that blacks now vote more than whites in
jurisdictions that are presumed to be racist, many responded as if the
Supreme Court reinstated Jim Crow. MSNBC’s Melissa Harris-Perry cried
out on Twitter, “Damn, that citizenship thing was so great for awhile.”

The article's denouement is powerful. The thesis? Times have changed, and liberals haven't.

Thursday, July 04, 2013

There are brothers in arms and bands of brothers, and now there are Noah, Sumner and Cole Ogrydziak, three Texas brothers who began their cadet training together at West Point this week.

For one of the few times in its long history, the U.S. Military Academy accepted three siblings into the same class. Twins Sumner and Cole, who just turned 18, and their 19-year-old brother, Noah, of Nederland in southeast Texas, have each signed on for four years of academics and military training. If all three make it through the rigorous program, they will simultaneously toss their caps into the air as newly commissioned second lieutenants in the Army in 2017.

Day 1 (actually Night 1) I did nothing but take this picture of the assembly area:

On Day 2 I did nothing. On Day 3 I started opening the two boxes and setting the hundreds of parts around my garage. My plan was to work on this at night, but the mere 25 degree temperature savings isn't enough--it's still uncomfortably warm out--and I can't see what I'm doing with just the small patio light on, so I'm going to have to bear down and work during the day. Step 1 in the instructions is to assemble the outer frame of the roof, and it requires 4 parts per side plus some nuts, bolts, and washers; I found the appropriate parts and staged them in the assembly area:

The instructions have the gazebo being built in 6 major operations with the parts labeled by operation: Parts 1A through 1D are for Step 1, 2A-2Z (or whatever) are for Step 2, etc. Tomorrow I want to identify each of the parts in my garage, group them by step number, and if I'm not dying of the heat by that time, start Step 1.

Again, I plan to post my progress each day as a motivating tool for myself.

Update #2, July 5, 2013: Granted, I couldn't care less what the Bolivian government thinks of us, but I thought the world was supposed to love us once we got rid of that half-cocked cowboy and got us a gen-u-ine Nobel Peace Prize winner for president:

The president, who expelled the U.S. ambassador in 2008, said he wouldn't hesitate to boot the embassy, too.

"Without the United States," he said, "we are better politically and democratically."